What colour is your problematic fave on this spreadsheet?
And a couple of new podcast links
Zionists in… the room with you right now? Phoebe Maltz Bovy on a new wave of blacklists targeting creative professionals who stand with Israel
In 2011 or thereabouts, I was chatting with some people from various countries about, for some reason, the actress Natalie Portman. Someone said something positive about her (I think it was that she looks like Natalie Portman, not her only strength but not not among her finer qualities), and someone else, a British woman, marginalized on a couple different axes (but no, not Arab or Muslim) and definitively of the left, countered that Portman is “a Zionist.”
At the time, I was unnerved (I was a doctoral student researching French antisemitism, not a random American Jew without context for this) but also caught off-guard. Wasn’t Portman just… Israeli? Since when was a nationality an -ism?
What did “Zionist” mean in this woman’s mind, such that this was a counterpoint to her being an alluring individual?…
In campus battles over Israel, Jewish studies professors remain dangerously silent
College campuses have been heated spaces for Jewish students for a long time. The rapid spread of tent-in protests that began at Columbia University last month has only exacerbated the issue, giving an international platform to pro-Palestinian (and anti-Zionist) students and faculty members grounded in our post-secondary institutions.
Jewish and non-Jewish protesters, both faculty and students, have been outspoken on these campus quads. But one cohort has been relatively silent: professors of Jewish studies. While Zionism is not inherent to Judaism, most Jews do support Israel, and rather than advocating for Jews on campus, these professors—who are generally more left-leaning—are often either siding with the pro-Palestinian protesters or simply keeping quiet.
This is the thesis that sparked an in-depth piece published this week in Mosaic, a journal of Jewish ideas, called “Jewish Studies against the Jews“. The author, Andrew Koss, joins Avi and Phoebe to explain his research and turn a critical lens on the state of Jewish academia in the United States, Canada and beyond.
And before that, the hosts have a few questions about Jewish Heritage Month. Why does it exist? Does it actually do anything? And how does teaching kids the hora celebrate “diversity and equity”, as our public school boards suggest?
